


See That My Grave Is Swept Clean

by jouissant



Category: Star Trek RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Bandits & Outlaws, Blood and Violence, M/M, Obsession, POV First Person, Period-Typical Sexism, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-07
Updated: 2015-12-07
Packaged: 2018-05-05 08:42:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5368928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zachary Quinto may have been trouble, but he was also money. He had a talent for getting out of a scrape like no one I’d ever seen, and when he did he was usually a sight better off than he’d been to begin with. If you fell in with him, you’d see your fair share so long as you could manage to stay alive long enough to collect. Naturally, I thought I could. I was arrogant back then.</p>
            </blockquote>





	See That My Grave Is Swept Clean

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Silent-Bridge and Steammmpunk for creating gorgeous art for this story. You're the best! And thanks (as always) to Medea, for everything, and everyone who encouraged me on Tumblr.

He crossed my path again at a whorehouse outside San Antonio. Well— strictly speaking I was the one doing the whoring. I’d had a thoroughly enjoyable interlude with Miss Alice upstairs, and while she slept I shambled down to the saloon to wet my whistle. There he was sitting at the bar drinking as casual as you please. He was trouble, and I should’ve seen him coming like a gathering storm. I was addled, I guess, saddle-sore and refractory. That Alice. They didn’t call her the English Rose for nothing.

He spun around and tipped his hat at me. “Mister Pine,” he said.

“Mister Quinto. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

His face was set in shadow, but his white teeth gleamed like a rack of stars. He took the hat off and set it on his knee. “John said you’d come to Texas,” he said. “Can’t say as I believed him, but here you are right in front of my own two eyes.”

I frowned. John never could keep himself to himself. “How is John?” I asked.

“Dead,” he said.

That brought me up short, but I didn’t let on. “You come all the way down here to tell me that?”

He laughed and took a drink of his whisky. “Hardly.” He looked me up and down and wrinkled his nose. “Do us all a favor and go wash up,” he said. “And then come on back. I’ve got a proposition for you.”

I had half a mind to tell him to go to hell, but the facts were these: Zachary Quinto may have been trouble, but he was also money. He had a talent for getting out of a scrape like no one I’d ever seen, and when he did he was usually a sight better off than he’d been to begin with. If you fell in with him, you’d see your fair share so long as you could manage to stay alive long enough to collect. Naturally, I thought I could. I was arrogant back then.

I grumbled my way out the front door and went around the side of the building to the pump. The water was icy, and I cursed as I splashed my face and as much skin as I could stand to bare in the late night chill. I damned Quinto, and myself for being dumb enough to come downstairs and walk into this mess in the first place, and I damned Alice for being so sweet and for being the most expensive whore I’d ever taken a shine to. Which led right back around to me again.

Quinto seemed pleased enough when I got back inside. He patted the barstool next to him and motioned to Karl the bartender. “Couple more of these,” he said. Then, to me: “I ought to make you buy me a drink, after that stunt you pulled in Junction City.”

“Stunt nothing,” I said indignantly. “That was a mess from the start, and you know it. Why you thought we could pull that off I’ll never know.” _That_ was a bank robbery half a year back, which had gone horribly awry and led to our gang sitting squarely in past tense and Zach locked up in the state pen.

“Bullshit,” Quinto said. “We could’ve handled it easily enough, if you hadn’t been such a hotheaded bastard about the whole thing. I had it all planned out, but you couldn’t keep your head, and look where that got us.”

“Nearly dead as John,” I said.

“Nearly deader. Anyway, that’s what I came to talk to you about.”

The bartender set my drink in front of me and I sucked it down in a single long slug. “So talk.”

He pursed his lips. The corners quirked up, like he couldn’t wait for whatever it was to burst out. “What if I told you,” he said, “that I got wind of a job that’ll make the First National Bank of Junction City look like pocket change?”

I rolled my eyes. “I’d tell you to put it back in your pants, first of all. And second of all, I’d tell you you came all the way down here to Texas for nothing, because I’m done. I’m out.”

He scoffed. “Is that right?”

“Right as rain. Just got back from driving twenty head of steer up to Missouri. Cattle company wants to bring me on again, wants me to lead up the drive this time. I ride out in a week.”

His prodigious eyebrows shot up into his hairline. “You’re a cowboy now?” When he got snotty some of the Yankee in him came out in his voice. I don’t think he liked it much.

“So what if I am?”

“Christopher Pine, riding the range. How’s the pay, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Pay’s fine.”

“Hmm. Is it, though?”

I glared at him. “What are you driving at?”

“Let me see if I can’t get it straight,” he said. “Tell me how I do. I’ve been pondering why you came down here to San Antonio, why you’ve got all these notions about hanging up your hat, and lo if I didn’t hit on a perfectly sensible explanation as soon as I laid eyes on you.”

He smiled dangerously, and I knew I was in for it. He was like a viper when he was in the right mood. “You want to make an honest woman of that whore upstairs,” he said. He’d been like that, always; I thought he had a bit of the second sight in him. He could see right through to the heart of a thing.

My face got hot. “Dammit, Quinto—"

He kept going. He must’ve been down here before I even got in; now that he was really going I could see he was good and drunk. “You want to scrimp and save for some little diamond chip and get down on one knee beside the cot where—“

“I swear to God,” I said, sliding my drink aside. Down the bar, sleepy-eyed patrons looked up from their cups.

“—Where she fucks ‘em ten a night.”

He exploded into laughter. I exploded up off my stool. My fist met his face with an almighty crack. I split his lip right away and my knuckles on his teeth for good measure. My blow sent him flying, his face ecstatic, his arms outstretched. He hit the ground and I was on him, landing punch after punch, and as my fists flew and he scrabbled at my face I knew that I was trying to beat something out of him that could never come free.

“You bastard,” I spat. “You couldn’t just leave well enough alone.”

“That’s enough,” a voice boomed at my ear. Karl yanked me to my feet, and for a moment I thought my feet came up off the floor entirely. He had Quinto in his other hand, his muscles quivering, biceps bulging like tree trunks and threatening to bust his sleeves. He hauled us to the door, Quinto snarling like a dog, and tossed us bodily out into the yard. We landed atop one another in a heap, the frosty air stilling us just as surely as a bucket of cold water.

Quinto was still hiccuping a laugh, his body twitching in a syncopated rhythm. “Shut up,” I said. “Just shut up.”

“You’re fooling yourself, is all,” he said. “You think you’re the first person to fall in love with her? You think you’re the fifth, or the fiftieth? What’re you going to do, drag her up to that godforsaken cabin? How long do you think that’s likely to last?”

“I said shut up, or I’ll do it for you. No playing around this time.” There was no fire in my words, though. My whole body throbbed, and I was still chilled from my splashdown at the water pump. “Ugh, think I cracked a rib.” I rolled off him, sat up and felt around gingerly.

“That Karl,” Quinto said. “He ought to know better. That was the most excitement this dump’ll see all year.”

I snorted. Say what you want about Quinto, he was a funny son of a bitch. There’d always been something about him that drew me in. “You know, you might be right,” I said. I got to my feet, imagining I could hear my bones creak with the cold as I did. I offered him a hand. He grinned up at me, his face a bloody wreck.

“C’mon,” I said. “I’ve got a bed in the rooming house around the corner.”

“Why, Mister Pine,” he said, making his voice high and reedy like a woman’s. “I do declare.”

“Don’t press your luck,” I said. “Lord knows why I didn’t just shoot you the last time I had the chance.”

“What’s stopping you now?” he asked.

He was right—I had my Colt on my belt same as always, but the truth was it hadn’t even crossed my mind. I’ve always thought I wasn’t cut out for killing—I couldn’t even butcher a cow without getting queasy and feeling like I owed it an apology. Didn’t have the stomach for it. Quinto did, though. I knew that much about him.

“I make it a point not to kick a man when he’s down,” I said. “Unlike some people.”

He grabbed my hand where I still dangled it over him, and I helped him to his feet. “How do you know I’m not down and out?” he asked. “My gang broke up same time yours did.”

“Oh, you always land on your feet,” I said. “No matter how you’ve got to twist to get there.”

He stared at me for long enough that I began to feel uneasy. His lip had swollen up, bee-stung, and the sight of all that gummy blood made me feel sick. “Let’s go,” I said, and we went.

***

My room was small and shabby, but it was mine. The landlady was kind and didn’t ask too many questions, and sometimes she left me biscuits when she did the baking.

“Nice,” Quinto said, looking around him. He was distinctly out of place in the cozy parlor.

“Get,” I said to him, indicating the stairs. “If someone comes in and sees you bleeding all over the place I’m liable to be evicted.”

I marched him into my room and sat him on the bed. “Wait here,” I said, and then I crept down to the kitchen and fetched a basin of water, an armful of rags I hoped the landlady wouldn’t miss. Back upstairs I cleaned him up, dampening a rag in the water and daubing it on his face to get the worst of the blood off.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked.

“Can’t have your face rot off with the gangrene, now can we.”

“What a lovely image,” he said. “But I’m being serious.”

“So’m I.” My uncle had been a field surgeon at Antietam, and the stories he told had put me off my feed for a good long while. As a kid I’d had a horror of infection. Not that I thought that was much of a worry now. No, now I mainly just felt bad, if I’m being honest. After all, Quinto and I went a ways back, and it was poor form to go around beating up old friends.

***

Bruce brought him up the mountain in springtime, to help with the planting. It was a golden, perfect spring, when the trees bloomed in the little orchard and Bruce’s fields were filled with rich black earth I spent long days tilling with Anton at my heels. I’d just turned seventeen and had begun to feel lucky for the first time in a long time, and when Bruce and Zach came home after one of Bruce’s trips to town I thought I’d just got luckier. I watched them wend their way up the track to the cabin from my customary perch in the big maple by the creek. There was Bruce on Aspen, the bay, and behind him was a tall dark-haired figure astride a big-boned grey gelding, its coat flecked with black the way we used to call fleabit. I was shy around people I didn’t know, and so when they’d gotten up to the house and I’d shimmied down the tree trunk it was the horse I went to first. 

“You’ve got a sweet face,” I said to him, rubbing his velvet nose. “What’s your name?”

“He’s Noah,” said the newcomer, ducking around the horse’s well-muscled neck. He clapped him on the withers. “My name’s Zach,” he offered, though I hadn’t asked.

Zach slept up in the hayloft. I could tell Susan felt bad about it, but he swore up and down he didn’t mind. “Noah’s my oldest friend,” he said, smiling privately down at his dinner plate. “And besides, I’ve slept worse places.” There wasn’t room in the house, anyway, so there was no alternative. It was good to have him around the place; my workload had never been too heavy, but I found I liked having someone around my age to talk to. For all I claimed to like my own company best of all, it seemed I’d been lonely. Anton was nice enough, but he was still a child. He had his toys and his lessons to occupy him.

“Is he their son?” Zach asked me one day. We were pruning in the apple orchard, collecting great springs of white, fragrant blossoms. I couldn’t stand to let them rot in the fields; I’d carry them back to the cabin and bundle them in every room til the whole place was redolent with their scent.

“No,” I said. “He’s an orphan. They couldn’t have children of their own.”

“Oh,” Zach said. Then: “I didn’t think so. There’s no resemblance.”

“Where do you come from?” I asked him.

“Back East,” he said. “I was on my way to California when I ran out of money and Bruce offered me the job here.”

I suppose most people would’ve told him about California then. We could’ve had a pleasant conversation about Los Angeles, about the best route to take over the Rockies and about all the little towns you could stop in and pick up a day’s work if you needed to. But there was no love lost between California and me, so we didn’t.

“Let’s get these in the house,” I said instead, holding up the cut branches. “It looks like rain.”

Rain indeed—it rained for the next three days, great sheets streaming down the mountain, making the creek swell as with snowmelt. Zach moved out of the hayloft and into my room, the two of us in one bed. We lay awake at night and talked, and he told me about his mother and brother and that when he was very young he’d wanted to be on stage, and I told him a little about where I’d been before the cabin. I left out the parts about the Boys’ Home, though, because I thought it’d bring down the mood. I could feel the warmth of his body where he lay alongside me, and as I watched the lantern flicker across his features I felt a strange liquid sensation in my chest I couldn’t put a name to.

***

I woke up the next morning to find Quinto gone. “How predictable,” I muttered to myself when I ran my hand over his pillow. Cold, and splotched here and there with blood where his cuts must have reopened in the night. I frowned at the stains, then stripped off the pillowcase and folded it. The landlady would have my head for ruining her bedlinen. I thought I’d take it over to Alice, see if she knew any tricks for getting blood out. She seemed to know all sorts of interesting things, about history, about the little birds that sang in the trees outside her window. She showed me a fat book once, _The Complete Works of Shakespeare_ , and though she knew her letters and everything she had me read to her anyway. We’d passed a whole hour like that, her head pillowed on my chest while I read from _Romeo and Juliet_. I’d still paid, of course, but that was only mannerly.

When I got to Karl’s place he was behind the bar already. He didn’t speak to me, just looked me over and shook his head.

Upstairs, I found Alice in her room, wearing her underthings. Her arms were full of her dresses; she only had two but the skirts were full and flouncy, and they’d once been very fine. She waved me inside, and I thrilled to think that we were close enough that she could stand before me this way, half undone. My prick twitched in my dungarees at the notion.

“Which do you think, Chris?” she asked me, holding them up one after another. “For traveling.” I had a hard time choosing. The blue set off her eyes, but the pink brought out the roses in her cheeks.

“The pink,” I said at last. Then, “Are you going on a trip?”

She dropped the dresses onto the bed and clapped her hands together. “You’ll never guess what happened,” she said. “Someone’s bought out my contract with Karl.”

I felt cold all over. Her face was a picture; I’d never seen her look so beautiful. So I sat heavily down on the bed and prayed my expression didn’t betray the icy hand that clutched at my heart. “That’s—that’s wonderful,” I said. “Do you know who it was?” I had my suspicions, and the thought made me feel sicker than Alice’s news.

“Karl wouldn’t tell me,” she said. “Said he wanted to remain anonymous.” She sat beside me on the bed and looked into my face. “I…thought it might have been you,” she said. By God, she sounded almost hopeful. I’m ashamed to say that I badly wanted to lie, but I couldn’t. Not to her, and not about this.

“No,” I said. “I’m afraid not.” I humored myself that her face fell a little at that, but it might have been wishful thinking.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, even so. Someone did. It’s all happened so quickly; I’m to be out of here by afternoon.”

“So it has.” I felt numb. My face was frozen in the same smile I’d put on when I’d looked at the dresses. “Where will you go?”

“I have an aunt in Virginia,” she said. “I’ve never met her, but once she wrote me a letter and said she’d have me on as a housemaid if I wanted. So I think I’ll go there. It’s funny, but after being here so long I think I’d like a nice long journey.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I can understand that.”

She took one of my hands in both of hers. She smelled of her perfume, lily of the valley, and I thought of how I used to bury my face in her bosom and breathe it in. It had always seemed cleaner than it had any right to be. In those moments I could almost forget she wasn’t mine alone.

“Chris—“ she started.

“Can I write you?” I asked.

“How will you know my address?”

“Send word,” I said. “When you’re settled. Please?”

She looked troubled. She bit her shell-pink lip and studied me. “All right,” she said at last. “I’ll do that.” She leaned up and kissed me on the cheek. “You’ve been very kind to me,” she said. “I have enough saved up to eat like a queen on the train, and I’ve got you to thank for most of it.”

My mouth felt very dry, my tongue over-large. “Of course,” I said. “Any time.”

She smiled tightly, the kind that doesn’t quite reach your eyes, the way you smile at a well-meaning but misguided child. “Well, if you don’t mind,” she said. “I have a lot of packing to do, and I’ve got to go and say goodbye to the other girls once they’re awake.”

“Sure, Miss Alice. Best of luck to you.”

“And you,” she said.

Both of us would need it.

When I left the whorehouse I made straight for the stables out back. I knew I’d find him there, and I was right. I tore through the barn door in a blind rage. He was standing in a stall running a currycomb over Noah’s glossy shoulder, and it was only the presence of the horse that kept me from laying him out again.

“You,” I said, jabbing my finger at him. “How could you do that to me?”

“Can’t say I know what you mean,” he said without turning around.

I grabbed him by the shoulder and made him turn to face me, digging my fingertips in deep. “You’re so full of it I’m surprised you can still move.”

“You’re hurting me,” he said calmly. Behind him, Noah shifted and snorted.

“I don’t care,” I said. “What did you mean by it? And why didn’t you tell me you had that kind of money?”

He smirked at me. My free hand curled into a fist of its own volition. God, but I hated him. “Look, I know you think she hung the moon, but she didn’t actually cost all that much. Karl’s running a fairly budget operation, if you want to know the truth.”

“You take that back,” I said, drawing up my fist. He looked at it and winced, and I knew despite his big talk he didn’t exactly relish getting his face bashed in. That lip looked like it smarted. As I watched he probed the cut with his tongue.

“Go ahead and hit me,” he said at last. “Won’t bring your whore back.”

“Stop calling her that,” I said miserably.

“Why? It’s true, ain’t it? And look how surprised you are, that she didn’t throw in with you right away. Deep down you wish you’d been the one to pay Karl off, so she’d have felt obliged.”

“I would never. I was going to give her the choice.”

“But you daydreamed about it anyway, didn’t you? And you’re well and truly sore that she didn’t beg to marry you as soon as she was free to do as she pleased. Maybe you built things up a little too high in your head, hmm? But all your lovemaking sure will buy her a pretty dress or two. Maybe she’ll even remember you when she wears ‘em.”

I let my hand fall from his shoulder. There was that damned insightfulness again. Said something about him, didn’t it, that this was what he used it for. “I really should’ve shot you when I had the chance,” I said.

Noah sighed, as if to say I’d never have been able to do it and I never would.

“It’s not a lost cause,” Zach said. “Is it? How’d you think she’d take it if you showed up on her doorstep with a pocket full of cash and a trousseau chockablock with pretty things?”

“And I suppose you’ll set me right up, won’t you, with this job of yours.”

“I didn’t say a word,” he said.

“But you’re just itching to tell me all about it, aren’t you. I can see how badly you want to.” He loved to hear himself talk, and he couldn’t stand not to have the last word.

“Sit with me,” he said, and collapsed into the hay. He leaned back against the wall of the stable and closed his eyes. I could tell from the way he held himself that he was waiting for me to join him. Some people might’ve thought twice about curling up on the floor while sixteen hands of horseflesh loomed above them, but it was just like he’d said the day we met: Noah was his oldest friend, and Zach had more to fear from me than him. His ears flopped back as he relaxed and flicked a fly off his flank with a twitch of his tail. Then let his eyelids droop just like his master had.

I didn’t see anything else for it. I heaved a great sigh and sank down next to Zach. The hay smelled good, at least; Karl kept a clean stable, though his rates for stalls were out of my price range and I grazed my own horse on the outskirts of town. I wondered idly if Zach had gotten to her too, prised off a shoe or turned her out in the woods to lose herself with the deer and rabbits. But he seemed eager to move on, and sabotaging my transportation wasn’t likely to get the two of us out of San Antonio together any faster.

“Why’d you do it, Quinto?” I asked him softly.

“Oh, you know me,” he said. “Can’t leave well enough alone.”

“You were all too happy to do it up in Kansas. And before that.”

“That was different. This…I heard about this and I couldn’t stay away, Chris. This has us written all over it.” He’d opened up his eyes and sat up off the wall. The clear excitement in his tone and the way he said my name got my blood up all right, in spite of the fact he’d ruined my chances with Alice.

“Why me? Why not Eric and John?” When I left Kansas they’d been licking their wounds and planning a new caper to wipe the slate clean after the debacle at the bank. I thought they were pressing their luck, personally. I thought walking away from all that carnage was the surest sign I’d ever have to get while the getting was good. I hadn’t talked to Zach about it at the time. He wouldn’t have listened anyway.

“I wanted you,” he said, letting the words linger too long without something to chase them, something that wouldn’t sound quite so soft.

***

I couldn’t put my finger on exactly when things changed between us. Maybe that first rainy night, when we’d lain there in the dark together. If it had been then I was too dense to notice at the time. But after that we had a new ease about us; sometimes I would catch Bruce or Susan look at us and then look at each other, and I knew they were thinking what a good thing they’d done, bringing Zach here 

There was an old field west of the house that had lain fallow for a decade, choked with rocks and weeds. Bruce wanted the use of it again, so he sent Zach and me to clear it, hauling the rocks aside and cutting back bushes and bracken and saplings. As spring warmed into summer we spent long days there, dragging out shovels and wheelbarrows in the morning and working until our muscles screamed, until we were near to collapsing. Susan packed us a lunch every day, and at noon we’d break and flop under the shade trees on the edge of the field, jamming sandwiches and apples into our mouths.

“Do you think you’ll leave here?” he asked one day.

The question took me aback. I realized I hadn’t thought of it before—once I’d found my way here I’d been so set on making sure I stayed that I hadn’t given much thought to the future. “I don’t know,” I said. “They talked about moving into town in a few years, but that was last winter. Susan’s lungs were bad and they were worried about the crops.”

“Did they talk about it with you?”

“A little,” I said. “I suppose I’d have gone, if they wanted me.”

When I thought about the two of them, I felt an unsettling mixture of nausea and warmth. They’d taken me in as an extra pair of hands, but at fourteen I was gawky and untested and they could’ve done better for a laborer. I’d always had the impression that there was supposed to be something more to it, that I was some sort of a surrogate. When Anton came I steeled myself for things to change, but they never did. If anything our little unit seemed to tighten, and when Bruce spoke of leaving and going down into the valley, of sending Anton to a real school, there was never a doubt that all four of us would go. If I’d had my own questions, I’d always been too yellow to ask them, and with Susan ill it hardly seemed the right time. But when things picked up again and Bruce had stopped looking so drawn all the time I’d been happy enough to let the topic lie.

“I’m still going to California,” he said, as if I’d questioned his resolve.

“Lighting out for the territories?” I asked.

He nodded, staring up at the meshwork of branches overhead. “Sure am. Maybe I won’t make it all the way, though. I’ll find some windswept little dugout and stay there. They say a man makes his own laws out on the frontier.”

“They say,” I said. “And what’s wrong with the laws we’ve got?”

He didn’t answer me, just shrugged and tossed his apple core into the trees.

He was a little late to authentically manifest destiny. Cities and towns had already begun to spill out across the plains and prairies, all the lonely places. There was plenty of opportunity for lawlessness, but not because one lacked for law. I think that’s what chafed at Zach so, the notion that someone could simply tell him what to do.

“Let’s get back to work,” he said. He rolled fluidly up onto his feet, and that was that.

When the weather began to get truly hot we’d make for the creek as soon as we finished for the day. We started out walking there, side by side and civilized. But one day he simply looked at me as we were laying down our tools, stripped off his shirt and started running.

“Goddammit,” I said, and followed at a clip.

I unbuttoned my own shirt as I ran and let it stream behind me, clinging to a sleeve. I could see him unbuttoning his trousers, running awkwardly as he fumbled with his buttons, and his missteps let me catch him up. I blew by and skidded to a halt on the bank, shucking off my pants, kicking free of my boots and diving into the cold clear water. I splashed at him, hooting with laughter, and having been bested he took his time undressing the rest of the way. My laughter died as I saw his trousers hanging low on his hips, saw him hook his fingers under the waistband of his underpants and drag them down. His belly was lean and covered in dark hair that furred his thighs; his sex hung heavy between his legs. I’d seen it before, seen _him_ before, but not like this, not with this playful air that put me so in mind of other things.

He raised his head and caught me looking, and I forgot myself for just a moment before I forced my hands back under the surface. I sent a diamond hail of creek water cascading between us, and when his naked form was obscured again I noted the barely perceptible slowing of my pulse.

After that I began to notice more about him: the fine veins at his wrists, the way his hands were shaped, his fingers shorter and thicker than mine. He had calluses from riding and from working; he had eyes the color of peat. His features, I decided, were handsome if prominent and slightly off-kilter. I thought it strange how much of him there was to see, how many little details now that I’d chosen to look. It felt like upending a log in the forest and watching life scramble forth from the moss beneath, all those things you’d tramp right by if you didn’t stop and look. One evening at dinner Bruce went in to see about helping Susan, and Anton stood at the basin shelling peas and babbling on about his pet chickens. The two of us were left alone at the table for just a moment, a fact we seemed to realize simultaneously. He sat in the broad ribbon of light that poured in through the little square window. My gaze was greedy for him, and as we sat I began to catalog again. His right eye is a little lower than his left. His bottom teeth are out of line like paving over tree roots. 

***

We rode out at dawn the following morning. My horse was eager, lifting her head to the east and snuffing at the crisp air. I stroked her neck. She was a pretty palomino whose appearance I fussed over unduly, and when Zach saw her he snorted and shook his head.

“She’s your Miss Alice in horseflesh,” he said as we were mounting up. “I hope you know that.”

I spat a wad of tobacco juice at him. He yelped and high-stepped away.

We set out in a southerly direction, riding at an easy clip for the time being. Zach told me his plan along the way, and as he spoke I began to see the sense in it.

“The Missouri-Pacific Railroad runs southwest,” he said. “From Houston to San Antonio straight on out through a whole lot of nothing into New Mexico Territory. It’s freight, so all it’s got on it are the engineers and a couple of crewmen. All we have to do is get on the train at one of the coaling stops and get the engineer to uncouple the cars. Then we take our pick of the cargo and hightail it back into the mountains before they can make it to the next town to alert the authorities.”

“Well, what makes you think there’s anything worth stealing on this particular train?”

He looked triumphant, nudging Noah into step with my mare. “Because, I hear tell this particular train’s got a load of cash headed out to a bank in El Paso.”

“You hear,” I said.

“I hear.”

“And who do you hear from?” I could press Zach all I wanted, but some things he’d never give up. His mysterious sources were among them. Back before Junction City I took to believing he was making them up, but then again I’d seen certain of them with my own two eyes.

“One of the boys from up in Omaha,” he said, fiddling with his reins.

Which was gentler talk for one of the good-for-nothings Zach met in jail, though as I was riding out with him on pretense of robbing a train I supposed I could also meet the definition. Zach’s stint in prison was one of several things we didn’t talk about much. To hear him talk, nothing but good ever came from him going to the big house. He got out early on good behavior and was apparently raring to go again, having spent his time inside not in the contemplative penitence inspired by hard manual labor but wheeling and dealing furiously as ever, with twice as many friends in places twice as low. 

“You really think this train is worth the trouble?” I asked. I knew already that it wasn’t. Nothing was worth the kind of trouble Zach was looking for, but I’d yet to work that out for myself. Later, when I hadn’t got anything else to do, I’d ruminate on it until I split my knuckles on the wall in a black and futile fury.

“Sure it is,” Zach said. “All we have to do is sling a couple of mail sacks’ worth of cash over the ponies’ backs and we’ve got ourselves set for life.”

“And then where? We can’t exactly go gallivanting off to spend our take. They’ll be looking for us all over the state. Hell, all over the country, maybe, if this cargo’s as precious as you say.”

He gave me a cloaked look, like he was trying to weigh something. “Mexico first,” he said. “We’ll make straight for the river. I think we ought to be ready to rough it; we’ll stop for supplies before we get out to Sanderson and we’ll camp awhile so nobody remembers us at a saloon or a hotel.”

“And then what?” I asked. “After Mexico.” 

He looked over at me again. The sky was coming on bright blue behind him, and the sun on his hair gave it a gloss like a crow’s wing. He was well-kempt, much more so than me. But he’d always been that way, oiling his hair, taking long soaks in the water Susan would heat up on the fire, laboring over his fingernails with a little boar-bristle brush and a cake of soap the nights we came in filthy from the fields.

“You still want to go back out west?” he asked.

The idea drew me up so short I hung on the reins. Coffee slowed up, craning her head around to get a look at her no doubt useless rider. Truth was, going back to the little cabin was something I’d never let myself think about, even in my wildest dreams. That Zach thought about it too—and he had to think about it, to bring it up to me like this—shocked me.

“I thought you’d sooner die than see that place again,” I said, careful to keep my tone level. “That’s what you said.”

He blinked back, like he was blinking into the sun. I didn’t flatter myself that he was impressed or daunted; it was a simple physiological inevitability that had nothing to do with me. “Huh?” he said.

“Don’t play dumb.”

“I’m not,” he said. “Honestly, Pine. I never said any such thing. I’m sure if I’d ever felt that strongly against it, I’d remember, don’t you?” His face was sweet as sugar, a look didn’t sit well with me, not one bit. Not on him. I shook my head and nudged Coffee into a canter, and after a minute I heard him curse and set Noah after us, the easy treble of his hoofbeats dogging me all the way to the next town.

***

The fever came on fast once it started, a heat that seemed to build in us, to roil and stretch like a living thing. I caught him looking at me more often than not now, at work and after when we bathed. He didn’t bother to hide it, only dragging his eyes away when we were in mixed company. Even then I felt a prickling and torturous awareness of both our bodies, where we were in space relative to one another, the way the air seemed to bend around and between us. When I sat across the table from him at supper, the way he held his fork was a message just for me. He dabbed at his mouth and dropped his napkin beside his plate and I tried to read the folds of cotton like tea leaves, like an animal track in the mud. 

We talked less, as if we knew that to name the thing was to loose it. After dinner he’d take Noah down to the low pasture and mount him without so much as a halter, smoke the tobacco he wasn’t allowed to bring into the barn. I sat on the porch and pretended to read by lamplight and stole glances at the way the lit end of his smoke glowed like a lazy firefly, down and up and down again.

Once a year Bruce and Susan would take Anton to Denver to buy supplies and visit with her sister. I’d gone along before, but this year we had the planting to do.

“I hate to have to ask you to stay,” Bruce said to me. “But we need the seed in the ground sooner than later, and at least with Zach here I know you won’t be lonesome.”

“Of course not,” I said.

“It’ll only be a week,” he said apologetically, as if I hadn’t lain awake at night and imagined this very circumstance, the little wagon trundling down the mountain out of sight, Anton waving blithely back at us. I felt like a traitor. None of them would ever think to imagine what lurked in our hearts as we stood together on the porch and watched them go.

When they were out of sight he turned to me. His breath came quickly, as if he’d been running, and I could feel my own heartbeat hammering to match. We came together and I didn’t know where to put my hands after so much imagining. I set them at his waist like we were going to dance, and he laughed at me but I wouldn’t let him go, just clutched great fistfuls of his flannel shirt and buried my face in his neck. He smelled like the horses.

“Chris,” he said softly, and when I looked up at him he took my face in his hands and kissed me on the mouth.

He took me out to the barn and spread a blanket out on the floor of the hayloft.

“Here?” I asked.

He nodded, his dark eyes wide like an owl’s. He didn’t have to tell me he felt strange about the house. I did too, as if we’d seep into the floorboards, a telltale spill. As we took our clothes off and lay down together I began to feel horrified. I thought: _if I can only get past it and know I survived_.

He put his mouth on me until I filled out. I stared at the rafters and kept my hands by my side, bit my lip and tried not to cry out. I felt his fingers against me, slicked with tallow, and I moaned and twisted about to try to get a look at him.

“Inside me?” I asked. I felt like a child. I’d never thought about it before, how you did it with another man.

“It feels good,” he said. “You’ll see.”

It felt like I needed to shit. I buried my face in my elbow as he slid his pointer finger in; I couldn’t bear that he was looking. I hadn’t looked at his prick since he’d taken his pants off.

When he slid inside me I thought I’d split in two. He was panting over me, his body quivering.

“It burns,” I said quickly. 

He ran his hands down my sides. “Sorry. I’m sorry. Just let me—“ He slid in until I felt him slotted flush between my thighs, until pain lanced along my gut and I cried out again. But he didn’t stop, rather picked me up by the hips and drove into me.

“Zach,” I said piteously. But when he drew back it was only to plunge deeper. Once, twice, three times, and I stared numbly up at him until he shuddered and spent into me, beyond hearing now, his face an ecstatic mask. When he was finished he slumped against my chest and cooed appreciation for the hospitality of my body. He wrapped deft fingers around me and brought me off while his seed leaked out of me onto the blanket. All I could think as he did was that—for all our care not to— we’d left a stain after all.

He was right, though: after the first time it did feel good. As the days went on we grew wanton. Under the barn’s forgiving roof I learned to spread for him shamelessly, to relish the way he stretched me and the cramp of my muscles as he set them trial upon trial in service to his varied appetites. The more he served up, the hungrier I grew, and just when I was certain I could never be sated the week ran out.

On the last night we made love in my bed. We didn’t talk about it, but just as we’d been mutually shy of the house in the beginning we seemed united now in our desire to bring something of our week in Paradise inside its four walls. For my part, I thought jealously of him passing nights in our hayloft.

“I want to know,” he moaned into my neck. “I want to sit at that dinner table and know we were both here like this.”

I sat astride him, and when he gazed up at me I felt like a king. Nobody else made me feel like that, certainly not before and never since. I might have dreamed it with Alice later, but in my heart of hearts I knew it wasn’t the same.

“You’re a quick study,” he said, and I moved my hips the way I now knew would make him gasp. When I was too overcome for coordination I tucked into his chest and let him buck into me, his hair rough against my cheek, his sweat a bloody tang in my mouth.

Afterwards we curled up together like two cats. I began to fret about the days to come and he shushed me. He started talking, and I listened to him ramble and let his voice lull me into a stupor. He was running from the law, he said, when he left Pittsburgh. He fought a man, and it was winter and he knocked him down on ice and his head hit the ground with an awful crack and he went still and Zach ran, he said, lit straight out west and didn’t stop til he got to Colorado and wrote his mama a letter with no return address.

“My brother’ll kill me if I ever go back, and rightly so,” he said. “For leaving Ma.”

I was half-dreaming already. His voice wove all around me like smoke until I was asleep, and when I thought back on what he told me I’d tell myself I couldn’t be sure what he had or hadn’t said, and anyhow he’d sounded very sorry.

(Years later I heard him tell the same story to a crowd after a long night of drinking, and in that version the man had had a full coin purse and his skull had split open like a pumpkin and Zach hadn’t sounded sorry at all.)

The next morning we stripped the beds and washed every sheet in the house, working over the washboard til our hands were chapped and sore. When my family came up the mountain again they were met with a fanfare of billowing white flags, and Susan clapped her hands and told us how lovely we both were.

“Look at the two of you,” she said across the table that night. “You’re getting to be just like brothers.”

***

The rolling hills gave way to rock and scrub, and Zach’s mood stayed buoyant. He rode up close to me, near enough that our stirrups clunked together and Coffee set her ears back, unsure what to make of our companions.

“She’s pretty,” Zach said.

I stroked her neck. “I know,” I said.

“Moves well,” he said.

I sniffed, and picked at a burr caught up in her vanilla mane. “Broke her myself,” I said.

He made an impressed noise. Then he sighed, and I could hear the moment he stopped pretending it was about the mare. “Are you still sore at me?”

I didn’t look at him.

“Chris,” he said.

“You’re crazy,” I said. “You know that? You come down here like we had some kind of—of a lovers’ quarrel instead of you throwing me over and nearly getting me killed. Why, if I was as stupid as you seem to think I am I’d be dead twice over. Makes me wonder why you want me in on this godforsaken scheme of yours.”

I hazarded a glance now. His mouth was downturned, a wounded moue, and his hat shaded his eyes. Good, I thought. I didn’t want to look in them. I wouldn’t find my way out again. I barely had the last time.

We stopped at a hotel to give the horses a rest before the last push west. After that we’d camp, the way Zach said, and I found myself grateful for the final gasp of civilization. I wouldn’t know until later how accurate that assessment was, but on the night in question I found my ire mellowing to annoyance and then away to nothing, to the simple satisfaction of a deep tub and a soft bed after a long ride. We saw to Noah and Coffee, fed them flakes of sweet hay in the barn behind the hotel. It was the biggest building on the main street, and from the upper balcony I could see clear down to the rail depot, watch the six o’clock steam in to roost on the platform like a great black buzzard.

I came in from the balcony and retired to the washroom, glad for the chance to soak some of the travel-weariness out of my bones. As I sank into the water a film of dust washed off me and swirled on the surface in milky eddies. I let my head loll back on the porcelain and groaned with pleasure, and then I got as clean as I could stand, rubbing my skin pink and raw as a new baby’s. I thought ahead to the next cattle drive, to the persistent grime and fatigue. Amidst the restless herd no night’s sleep was ever deep enough, and no dunk in a freezing river or stock tank would make a man any less offensive to the eyes or nose.

When the water had gone cold I dragged myself out of the clawfoot tub, shaved, and dressed. When I came out into the bedroom Zach was nowhere to be found. But if the rollicking piano music coming from the first floor was any indication, I wouldn’t lack for entertainment without him. I wouldn’t lack for company, either—it seemed like every pretty girl in town was in the hotel bar, drinking and dancing and carrying on. At the heart of it all was Zach. He sat at a round table, a cigarette between his lips and a glass of whiskey at his elbow. He was dealing cards.

I shook my head and bellied up to the bar. If he wanted to gamble away whatever was left after he’d bought Alice’s freedom, that was his business. Zach and I were partners now in only the most nominal sense. He wasn’t beholden to me. But then again, whispered my traitorous brain, when was he ever?

“Hello, there,” said a voice at my elbow. The lady it belonged to cut a slender figure in a green satin dress. She was a sight for sore eyes, and I told her so.

“And speaking of eyes,” I said, “yours are lovely. Why, they look just like two cups of black coffee.”

She rolled them, coffee and all. “Haven’t heard that before,” she said. “Mostly it’s ‘fine Swiss chocolate’.”

“I prefer coffee,” I said. “In fact, I love it so much I named my horse for it.”

“There’s an insult in there somewhere,” she said. “I’m just not sure if it’s to me, you, or the horse.” She crossed her gloved arms across her chest and nodded at the bartender.

“Better make it me,” I said. “Less trouble all around that way. Drink?”

She smiled then. “I never drink,” she said, but she let me buy her one anyway.

Her name was Zoe, and she was just passing through. In fact, she’d gotten off the six o’clock train I’d seen pull in from my vantage point on the balcony. She was a singer, she said. Opera. Her mother had trained her up from a little girl, her voice so coddled she was barely allowed to speak above a whisper. She was bound for New York and then for Europe; she’d found a _maestro de cappella_ willing to take her on, a doddering old man who claimed to have taught Verdi, and when she learned all she could, she said, she was going to make her name in Milano, in Vienna, in Paris.

“You need this toast more than I ever will,” I said. “I wouldn’t know an opera if it bit me in the ass.” We clinked our glasses together, and no sooner had I raised mine to my lips than an explosion of noise blared from the direction of the card table. I drained my drink in one gulp before I turned to look.

“He’s cheating,” a man was shouting, jabbing a finger at Zach. “He’s a dirty cheat.”

I winced. “Excuse me,” I said to Zoe. I didn’t wait for the no doubt incoming look of shock and disapproval, but I imagined I felt it burn between my shoulder blades regardless.

Zach had clambered up from his chair and had the look of someone trying hard to keep his head. I could practically see his thoughts as they spun out every which way: here is the door, here is the clearest path from the card table to the door, here is a very large bottle of bourbon he could wield like a club if he set his mind to it.  
“Now, now, gentlemen,” Zach said, both hands raised deferentially. “I may have gotten a bit bold, but who can blame me? I was on a roll, after all.” He gestured to the table, piled high with his winnings.

“Roll nothing,” the man said. “You’ve been screwing us from the moment you sat down.” The big man opposite Zach had a pistol at his belt, and Zach had his Smith and Wesson down the back of his pants. I could see where this ended and it wasn’t anything like keeping our heads down the way we were supposed to.

I cursed under my breath and made my way across the room, sidling up next to Zach. He didn’t notice me until I was right up alongside him, and when I spoke he jumped. It was just a twitch, really, not enough for the men at the table to notice, but I did, and I was gratified. I’d always leapt at any opportunity to shake him up, even a little. They were few and far between.

“Gentlemen,” I said, nodding at them. “Zachary. I see you’ve made some friends, mmm?”

“Hello there, Pine,” he said. “Pity you’ve missed the action. I was just about to say my goodbyes.”  
I noted the cash was no longer on the table, and Zach’s hand was on his gun.

The man across the table looked apoplectic. Zach just looked amused. I grabbed his elbow and yanked him into the crowd; the man roared behind us, but the place was packed enough that the sea of people closed the gap and temporarily obscured us as if behind a curtain.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I hissed as we made for the stairs. Out of the corner of my eye I imagined I saw Zoe watching me with obvious disapproval, which was frankly nothing I didn’t deserve.

“Easy,” he said. “I was only having a little fun. And they were miserable at cards. I would have been a fool not to.”

“Your little bit of fun will sear our damn faces into everyone’s memory,” I said. “Honestly, Quinto.”

We pounded up the stairs and locked the door to our room behind us. I figured we had five or so minutes at the outside before they found us, so I started packing up quick as you please. He loitered against the wall and watched me, arms crossed over his chest. He fingered his chin, dense with the dark hair that covered the rest of him. “I’ll shave it,” he said. “That’ll throw them off the scent.”

I ignored him. He always had some loophole. “I suppose it was too much to ask for a last night in a real bed,” I said, more than a little bitterly.

“Oh, come off it,” he said. “You’re talking like we’ve been on the trail for weeks. And besides, you’re a cowboy now, aren’t you? I’d have thought you’d be right at home out under the stars.” The way he said _cowboy_ made my hands twitch for his throat.

At home or not, under the stars was where I’d be tonight. I noticed Zach hadn’t bothered taking anything out of his rucksack, which meant he hadn’t exactly planned on a restful evening. The thought further stirred my ire, and I vaguely contemplated flinging open the door to take on all comers. But then I’d surely commit myself to memory, and anyway I’d be certain to lose Zach in the shuffle. Already he was waiting at the window, and when I shouldered my pack he nodded once at me and ducked out.

The night was cool and crisp, and as I leapt from the sill to the adjacent balcony and swung down onto the earth below I felt a surge of energy to match my anger. As we ran headlong for the stables and my heart began to pound I felt young again in spite of myself, and in that moment it might have been the beginning rather than the end.

We readied the horses in a tear, and as I flung myself up on Coffee’s back and spurred her into a canter I saw the gang of men spill out of the hotel. But it was too late; we were already gone, and Zach turned to whoop at them, evidently unable to resist the urge to crow his victory. They fired a few erstwhile shots after us, but they were drunk and the night was dark and the gunfire was swallowed up by the flurry of hoofbeats, a coda for our departure.

We rode up into the hills, running the horses longer than we should have in case anyone thought to come after us. “They won’t make it far,” Zach said. “They’d have to be crazy to risk a horse over this ground.”

“Like we are?”

He shook his head. “Noah knows his business.”

And he did—the old grey gelding picked his way over rocks and around vicious stands of cactus as if in broad daylight. I gave Coffee her head and let her follow; she seemed bolstered by Noah’s presence. And God help me, I felt bolstered by Zach’s, loath as I might be to admit it. I was reminded of the early days, the way I’d trailed along behind him like Coffee did Noah, like a lost dog. I’d been grateful—I thought I’d stumbled onto the right path at last, that I could trust him to lead me straight, keep me away from the thorns. Little did I know he liked the sharp edges best of all.

We found a spot in the lee of two great boulders, as cozy as you could hope for, which wasn’t saying much. Zach slid off Noah tiredly, loosed his girth and did the same for Coffee. The two of them wandered to the edges of the clearing to mouth at the weeds. I poked around the perimeter, squinting into the darkness for anything objectionable; though it was too cool out for snakes, there were plenty of equally distasteful creatures that made their homes out here in the desert. I found a candle in my pack and lit that, using its anemic flame to scrape together enough kindling for a campfire.

“Don’t suppose you made off with anything to eat,” I said.

Zach looked confused at first, as if he didn’t often have cause to think about so mundane a thing as food. “Sorry,” he said.

I scrounged a sad can of beans from the bottom of my saddlebag and opened it with my knife. I offered it to him but he demurred. I didn’t have a fork so I spooned up what I could with my fingers, not bothering to warm it.

“That’s vile,” he said lightly.

“I’m hungry.”

He shook his head as if to say he’d never understand me. That was a lie. I gave him a long look. His head was down; he stared off into the glowing coals like there was something read there, some secret written out for him alone to see.

“I missed you,” he said presently.

I set the can down and wiped my slimy hand off on my coat. “Don’t,” I said.

“I did,” he said. “In the penitentiary. I thought of you all the time.” He poked at the fire with a stick. “Come and sit next to me,” he said, wheedling.

“Zach—"

“It’s cold.”

It was— despite the fire the mercury was dropping by the minute. By morning there’d be a fine frost over everything. Our hair and the horses’ coats would be stiff with it. We were poorly equipped for camping; we’d intended to buy bedrolls at the least, but then we hadn’t planned to sleep out until tomorrow. Zach didn’t do well in the cold. I used to tease him about it. I sighed, getting up and moving over to where he was. I reached for him and flipped his collar up against his neck. He shivered at my proximity, let his eyes drift closed.

“I’m only trying to make it up to you,” he said. “I saw you talking to that girl.”

“We were just talking.”

“Hmm. You’re awfully interested in the fairer sex these days.”

“Maybe I’m getting older,” I said. “Maybe I’m thinking about things. Taking stock.”

“ _Breeding_ stock, you mean.”

I scoffed. “Jesus.”

“Don’t take His name in vain.” His teeth glittered in the firelight. He caught my hand where I’d let it rest on his shoulder, brought it to his mouth and breathed into my cupped palm. He fastened my hand over his mouth and lapped at it. He sunk his teeth in between my thumb and forefinger, and I hissed, letting it broaden into a moan as he soothed the sting with his tongue.

We kissed like liquor tipped down a throat. He distracted me the way drink can, chasing off the cold so that I barely felt a chill when we undressed on the nest of our overcoats. Both of us were edgy; though the horses dozed unconcernedly around us the night felt fraught with undetectable dangers. Neither of us wanted to be the one on his back when they came to meet us, so we sat up and wound around each other. He spat in my hand again and made me pry him open.

“There’s something torn up in me, Pine,” he said as we moved together, his voice tight with want.

There was something torn in both of us. The edges lined up well enough, but the sum of our parts was not a glad thing. I worked a season on a sheep farm, and once I saw twin lambs born fused; they kicked free of their mother’s heaving body and flopped onto the blood-slicked grass. Their eyes were milky and sightless, their mouths hungry. They writhed together, a gangly, ungulate starfish, and as the farmer raised high the dooming blade of his shovel he said: they share a heart. How far can they go in this world?

***

After the Greenwoods and Anton came back, things were all right for awhile. 

For the first few weeks Zach and I didn’t talk much; we were stunned, and the thing between us was wobbly-legged and new. I couldn’t bear to look at him in company; I was certain everything we’d done was written all over me. I couldn’t walk into the barn without wrinkling my nose. I thought we hung in the air there. The clearing was finished now, so instead we planted, long days stooped in the loamy field with Anton our unknowing chaperone. I could feel Zach’s eyes on me then. I ignored them and let the tension build again.

At last it grew too much to bear. The want of him stopped me sleeping, and I lay in the dark. I was hard, the drape of my quilt a soft torture where it clung to me. I forced myself to stay still, to listen for Anton’s breathing, and when I had convinced myself he was well under I slipped out of my bed, out of my room and then out of the house altogether.

I shuffled to the barn, pajamas rustling around the shafts of my boots. The place was dark and humid, sweet with hay. There was no sound but the quiet movements of the horses, no light but a glow from the loft. I went up the ladder boldly, and when I came to the top I saw a lantern hanging from a nail in the wall. He knelt before it, his prick proud between his thighs, and I though I didn’t envy him the bite of the floorboards through the hay I was heartened to see that he wanted the same as me. He looked into my eyes and fisted himself, thumb spreading a wetness that caught the lamplight.

I couldn’t speak. I made a strangled sound and clambered over the top of the ladder, crawled to him and let him strip me. I wanted to bury myself in him; I settled for a faceful as we lay in parallel, my spit all over him, his tongue inside me. Afterwards we lay together, his palm flat against my chest.

“Your heart,” he said. “It feels just like a little bird’s.”

I laughed. “It doesn’t,” I said.

“It does. The way it heaves against my hand, I think I could lift it right out and crush it.”

I shifted then, afraid; his face looked far too serious, his gaze fixed in the center of my sternum. He looked like he was working out how to do it. But when I turned onto my side he curled into me and kissed my shoulder absently as if he’d never spoken at all.

“I want to tell you something,” I said.

I took a deep breath and when I let it out I told him about California, about my parents and the accident and the children’s home. He lay still behind me, lips poised against my skin like a hesitant butterfly.

“Bruce,” he said quietly, when I was finished. “And Susan.” I’d left off at meeting Bruce in Denver, him asking if I was any good with horses. He should’ve met Zach first.

“I—is it awful not to say I love them?” I didn’t. I felt as if I should; my affection for them was nothing more than that, a weak tincture.

“No,” he said.

“If I were younger,” I started. “Like Anton, you understand. But I—"

“It’s all right,” he said.

I sighed. Early on at the children’s home I’d longed for my family. It seemed impossible that they were gone forever, my mother dashed to pieces on rocks beneath the bridge from which their train careened, my father never found. I’d dreamed fervently and in great detail of the day he’d turn up on the institution’s doorstep, having dragged himself half-drowned from some river. Or perhaps, I thought, he’d lost his memory, and was going about his business somewhere far away, oblivious to my existence or to the tragedy that had ripped all knowledge of me from his brain. Was this better or worse, I’d wondered, than being dead?

“Would you ever leave them?” Zach asked. He’d asked me the same question before, but this time his meaning was different. We both knew it.

“I’d feel bad. When Anton’s big enough to help Bruce with the heavy jobs, maybe. Or if they do move away.”

“Mmm.”

“And you?” I asked. “You’re not here forever. What about California?” Even if he hadn’t told me, I’d have known by now he wouldn’t stay. There was a restlessness in him that reminded me of a howling wind, the kind that roared down over the mountains from the north in late autumn. Move along, it seemed to say to the season. I have to freeze and bite and sting.

“Someday,” Zach said.

After that night it was impossible to go back to silence. Things were harder that way, but when I thought I’d given myself away with a word, smile, a clap on Zach’s back that lingered too long I’d remember what Susan had said about us being brothers and remember that what we were instead was a wholly unnatural thing, a thing nobody would ever think to look for. And so we hid like that, in plain sight. I tortured myself sometimes by picturing their faces if they knew. Sometimes at supper I’d imagine setting my fork down and spilling everything, dragging Zach across the table to me. Would they scream at us? Would they cast us from the house? I began to dream at night, waking up in a sweat half-convinced I’d done it.

“Don’t stay away from me,” he’d said that first night in the hayloft, and so I hadn’t. I’d lie awake until the place was still and then I’d creep outside. Sometimes I’d go to him and we’d fuck straight away, and sometimes we’d pretend we were just going to talk. But it was only ever pretense, and before long we’d lay down together, my guts full of him or his of me.

He liked for me to put it in him. I found it surprising, that he’d want to. But he took my girth in laughingly, and when I was careless and hurt him it only made him wilder for me. He clung to me and dug his nails into my skin and told me things that made me blush, the kinds of things I’d think of the next morning at breakfast, sputter into my coffee and make Anton kick me under the table and say, _What?_

“I can’t live without you,” he said to me when the leaves were nearly off the trees.

I shuddered. We were down in the pasture, patching up the horses’ little shelter there. It was morning, and cold; an early frost coated the grey-green brush and I stepped into a shallow, glassy puddle to hear the crunch of the ice.

“Me either,” I said, and felt sick.

One night I went out to the barn as usual. I didn’t find him in the hayloft; he was hunched up in a corner, his hands cupped in his lap, and when I got up to him I could see that he held in his hands a tiny orange flame. He cradled it like a small animal. When he saw me looking he turned his face to me; it was all aglow from within. He showed that flame to me proud as a new father, like he’d just discovered fire.

“What the hell are you doing?” I hissed.

“Nothing much,” he said.

I knocked the fire out of his hand. It was a lit match, and it fell to the floor and had just enough time to catch a crispy strand of hay before I crushed it under my boot.

“Are you crazy? This whole place’ll go up.”

He rolled his eyes. “Calm down,” he said, and grabbed my arm. He tugged me down beside him and slid a warm hand inside my coat, up under my nightshirt. “I was just looking.”

I shuddered at his touch. I could feel myself beginning to cease caring about the match. “Yeah, well. Fire has a way of getting away from you.”

“Not me,” he said. “Not me.”

In those days it was easy to believe him immortal, to believe that he could have anything he wanted, do anything he wanted. He seemed to, was the thing. He put his head down in prayer at the table, did his work for Bruce and called Susan “ma’am” and whittled Anton a little family of bears from scrap wood. And he loved me; he made my body sing for his. But I couldn’t help but suspect another side to him entirely, a secret world he could step into whenever he liked, one where he alone ruled.

He liked to walk in the woods alone. As the days grew shorter and the snow began to fall I worried about him out there as the darkness came down and the wind came whistling through the murky pines. When he wasn’t back by dinner I’d give in to my gnawing anxiety and drift along the place where the field met the trees, my hands jammed in my pockets and my breath a spumy cloud. I wanted badly to call for him, but I was too embarrassed, like a child that frets over a dog gone wandering. He’d come trotting up soon enough, panting and pleased, a hare between his teeth and his body caked with indiscernible muck. He was the sort to roll in it, was Zach, and the fouler the better. When at last he broke free of the tree cover he’d take awhile to find me, and when he did he’d blink at me like he was coming awake, like he wasn’t sure who either of us were.

“You’re a man again,” I said, when he knew me.

“What?”

But I couldn’t explain, and only said that I thought we ought to go inside.

I couldn’t stop thinking of him out there. I felt mean about it, and jealous, and so one evening I waited for him after we’d finished our chores, fed and watered the horses and gotten them in for the night. Dinner was on the stove, a big pot of stew, and Bruce was sitting at the table helping Anton with his letters. The cabin was warm and homey and I wanted nothing more than to stay there in the middle of it, but the part of me Zach owned couldn’t, wouldn’t leave off. I loitered on the porch until I saw his shape light out from the barn doorway. He didn’t look at the house at all, so it was easy for me to follow. The fronts of his coat flapped indomitably in the chill air even as I drew mine around me against the elements, and like that we lurched separately into the woods.

He moved forward steadily, as though he’d already cut a track, but I followed his footsteps directly through the crisp snow and they led over rocks and thick, impenetrable knots of bramble uncleaved by any trail that I could see. If it weren’t for the footprints I’d have been inclined to believe he wasn’t walking on the ground at all, that he flowed through the air above it by some strange force all his own.

Eventually I blundered into a particularly gnarly thicket and half-fell through it into a clearing, and when I did I nearly walked straight into him. He was kneeling on the ground. He’d made a campfire, a big brother for the one in the barn.

I felt happy to be out there with him, in spite of the shiver that made its way down my spine. I stopped caring about stealth, and I spoke. “Good job it’s not summer. These woods are a tinderbox then.” I laughed. The sound rang out brightly once, then seemed to freeze in midair, to shatter on the ground at my feet before it reached him.

He was on me in seconds, biting, scrabbling. I was struck dumb at first; I wasn’t certain he meant to hurt me, but then he was and I didn’t have a choice but to fight back. He was strong, but so was I. We did the same work, day in and day out, and for now at least we were a match. He threw me to the ground and flung himself down after me, and I got off a swift cut across his cheek that made him grunt. He rolled us, and I felt the brief sear of coals at my back and then the smell of burnt wool dampened by the snow. He was bleeding; I’d _made_ him bleed, and I found the thought exciting. Blood fell in my eyes, salty and warm, and he kissed me through the veil of it, and I laughed and hit him again

***

I opened my eyes to a limpid sky and the sound of his voice. The rocky earth ground against my back, but I’d woken up worse places. There was a feeling about my heart that was awfully close to fondness. Dangerous, I thought.

“We’re close,” he said. “We’ll make the train in a day’s ride, give or take.”

“We can’t go as fast as a train,” I said, stupid with morning.

“No, but we can cut upcountry, find the best route. They’re stuck on a straight shot. And they stop.”

He was humoring me today. _You’re so cow-eyed when you first wake up,_ he’d said once, the back of his hand pressed to my cheek. He’d stuck his face up close to mine and made his eyes go wide and dumb, and I’d fairly throbbed with shame. This morning he was distracted; there was no time to needle me. He looked as if he’d thought better of camping. He was packing with alacrity, what little we’d strewn around last night’s fire disappearing into his saddle bag before my eyes.

“Best get moving,” he said to me superfluously.

Mounting up, I was glad for the time I’d had off between cattle drives. Wouldn’t do to come at this operation saddle sore. For the first time I thought of what it might have cost Zach to find me, a long ride south on a doughty but aging mount, body gone soft from long months in sitting on his ass in jail.

“What’d you do?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“In the clink. I’d’ve thought a man like you’d go crazy.”

“I nearly did,” he said, looking off at the horizon, down at his hands, anywhere but at me. “There was a library, if you can believe it. And if you can call it that; there were only four books and I knew them off by heart by the end. And…I had a friend, and the two of us got by.” He did look at me then. To see how I’d take it, damn him. 

True to form, my stomach twisted. Given our history—hell, given Alice—I had no right to jealousy, but I felt green anyway. Of course he’d had a friend. You couldn’t ignore Zach unless he wanted to be ignored, and even then it was a challenge.

“He the one who gave you the tip about the train?”

He looked away again. I couldn’t keep the bile out of my voice. He’d be quivering with pleasure at the sound, I guessed.

“Maybe,” he said.

Well didn’t that just figure, I thought. “Why am I here in his place, then? Hmm?”

Zach spoke in clipped tones. “Well, he’s dead, for starters.”

“And how’d that happen?”

He looked back, and the corner of his mouth twitched. I felt the world tilt a moment when it did. I had a split-second’s chance at the kind of shame that would become a better man, but I had a demon on my shoulder to match the man who rode beside me, and he was the sort of fellow who made murder something to wink about.

“Thought so,” I said.

“Oh, Pine,” he clucked. “He wasn’t the man for the job, is all. And he’d have wanted to come along. He was very…he made assumptions,” Zach said. “Certain assumptions, and perhaps that’s my fault, but I’m sure you can appreciate the delicate nature of the circumstances.”

“Delicate or not, there’s no call to go killing people.”

“Now, who said anything about killing?” His voice was soft, a little gooey on that last word. Zach might not say much about killing but damned if he didn’t think about it, rub his face all over it there in the privacy of his own mind. I’d seen it with my own eyes, the thinking and the saying both. And the doing, for good measure. Damned, damned, have I mentioned yet I was damned? I was, from the start.

“Besides,” Zach started. He nudged at Noah’s flanks with his heels so the grey pulled a little ways ahead of me, so I was looking at a slice of his face as he turned back. “Besides, what would you have done if I’d turned up with him?”

I didn’t reply.

“Exactly,” he went on, as though I had. “You’d have killed him yourself.”

When Zach said “a day’s ride” he’d meant a full goddamn day. We went on and on until the horses got footsore, over hill and dale, curving around rocky outcrops and zigzagging up and down from the river. I could see the railroad steel glinting in the sun, and once I caught a glimpse of thin coal smoke fanning out into the atmosphere. That was heartening, and it was even more heartening to come upon Dryden and Comstock, to see their waiting depots bustling with people. I was reassured that there was actually going to be a train where Zach said it would be. I wouldn’t put it past him to drag us across Texas chasing phantoms.

We were closing in on Sanderson, racing the sun.

“Will it be tonight?” I asked.

“Can if you want it to be,” he said. I wasn’t sure that what I wanted had anything to do with anything, but I thought he’d simper at me if I said so, and I didn’t want to hear him talk to me like that.

“Guess it’s as good a night as any.”

He nodded. “No moon.”

There was a moon, after all. But it wasn’t much of one, a smeary semicircle haunted by a ring of cloud. We watched it come up on a rise outside of town, watched as it made the rail line glimmer like twin veins of water. At a quarter to eleven we heard the whistle, a ghost’s herald cry, and then the train itself lumbered into view. I thought it looked fat and lazy, like a well-fed snake. We sat and watched it come to rest. The horses grazed and bats swooped against a violet sky.

Zach slid close to me. I could feel the whole length of him pressed right up against my body, and he brought his palm up to cup my knee through my dungarees. Most of the time when he touched me there was a thrill to it, an electric zing, but now there was a gentleness to him. I hesitate to call it calm; it was steelier. Resolve, maybe. Resignation.

“I had occasion, in prison,” he started.

“Oh?”

“Occasion to think.”

“Isn’t that what a convict always says?” I asked. “That they thought long and hard about what they’d done?” That they spent days on days, just ruminating?”

“I didn’t think about what I’d done,” he said. “I thought about you.”

“S’usually when a man finds God,” I said, ignoring him.

He put his lips to my throat. “I lost God a long time ago. I’ve wandered much too far to find Him again.”

Funny, though—he still sounded reverent. I wondered then, as I often have, whether or not he had a compact with the hereafter. I think it would explain a lot, leastwise his curious relaxation here on the eve of our grand scheme. If you had your life all laid out before you, if you could see the way it wound down towards the end, perhaps you’d take it with an armchair kind of calm. Perhaps you’d sit beside a man who’d meant something to you, look at him softly with your mouth upturned and all the things you’d never said crowding behind your lips.

But now I’m being sentimental.

***

All things considered, I shouldn’t have been surprised to wake up to fire. The heat was what roused me, and when I opened my eyes I was assaulted by flame, great gouts of it leaping up the walls, apocalyptic tumbleweeds of hay adrift like Chinese lanterns. I might have stood and watched them, transfixed, were I less enamored of my life. 

I was in the hayloft. I’d drowsed there for an hour or three, tangled up with Zach in the wake of our coupling. It got cold in the barn; on that pretense I curled around him, twined our limbs like ivy though he fussed and tossed his body like a bronco at the barest hint of restraint. Now he was gone, and I was no longer cold. The heat was a living thing, roiling, stretching, reaching for the ceiling beams with fiery fingers. Immediately I couldn’t breathe; I felt as if the fire itself raced into my lungs after the air itself.

“Zach!” I called, but the roar of the flame ripped the words away into the torrent below. I could hear the crack of wood, and for a split second I was reminded of hearth fires, campfires, a host of pleasant associations that were nowhere near this. This fire was a foreign country, and I had to get out.

Down in the barn the horses were screaming. Their voices sounded like rending metal; their cries for help mixed with the stinging smoke and brought tears to my eyes, sent them streaming down my cheeks. But the floor was a sea of fire and they were beyond my help now. There was a small, square window across the loft, and I knew with a horrible certainty that if I couldn’t make it I was finished. I ran for it over the hay that lay matted beneath my feet, the soft sweet hay I’d passed so many nights on. Now the floor of the hayloft sagged and glowed; the ceiling below it had caught and the floor was dissolving beneath my feet. I made it to the window and bashed it with my fist. The glass was old and brittle and easily handled, and I was dimly aware of stinging pain as it bit through the calloused flesh of my hand.

Outside the air was crisp. I bashed out the rest of the glass and stuck my face outside, sucked in a deep breath before I set my shoulder to the wood and began to crawl through. The window was narrower in breadth than the span of my body but not fitting was not a consideration. I burst through on the strength of adrenaline and fear; I’d be digging the splinters out of my skin for weeks.

Free of the building, I skidded down the roof, catching on shingles and then falling free again. I thought vaguely of the ground below me, but all in all I didn’t much care. Break my bones though it might, I wasn’t going to roast alive, and that was all that mattered. When I finished my roll earthward and fell to the dirt with a resounding crack I shut my eyes and breathed in the pain, thanked God for it and told him I’d do anything, anything, anything. It was a lie, in the end, though is it really a lie if you mean it at the time?

Alive, and with a chance of staying that way, my thoughts were free to turn to Zach. Zach, over the horses, over the barn that was my family’s livelihood. For they were my family, Bruce and Susan and Anton, and since I’d come awake in the inferno of the hayloft I hadn’t spared a thought for them at all. If I was honest, I hadn’t thought of them in weeks. Only in passing, only as obstacles to be dodged from sun-up to the last lamp extinguished, til I was free to be with him again. Susan ran to where I lay on the ground; the folds of her sweet-smelling nightgown fell around my face and her hands on my cheeks were wonderfully cool, and I felt ashamed.

I flailed upwards until she dropped me and backed up, the better to avoid my wheeling limbs. I didn’t bother apologizing. I was panicked, and she’d forgive me my violence. When I was on my feet I tore around the side of the barn only to pull up short at the door. Great flaming beasts heaved in the maw of the doorway; they might have been the horses, gone mad with fear, or they might have been demons made of oxygen and backdraft.

Fire is loud; I’d never thought of it before, but now I could hear every groan and crackle, as if the building itself was calling out to me for help. The air was screaming, screaming, and I was screaming too. I want to say I ran headlong inside, gave myself up to the flames to find him, but I only stood in the doorway, paralyzed in horror, until the whole thing seemed to swell outwards at once and a pair of strong arms got me around the waist and carried me away.

I wanted it to be Zach. It wasn’t; it was Anton, his weight wrapped like a boa ‘round my neck. When had he gotten so strong? Or maybe I’d just gone limp and flabby with shock. He was yelling in my ear and all of a sudden I couldn’t stand it.

“Shut up, shut up!” I said, and flung him off of me like I had Susan.

He didn’t stop yelling, and the sound and the heat were sickening. I smelled something like barbecue, and that made everything worse. I folded at the waist and puked onto my boots, and abruptly I realized I was wearing nothing but my own singed nightclothes, and I’d come crawling out of the place Zach slept, and the best I could hope for was that catastrophe would swallow us all up before I had to bother with the consequences.

There was no saving the barn. The light lit up the night like a beacon and woke the neighbors. They came streaking down the valley, but it wasn’t hard to tell the fire would well outstrip the pace of our bucket brigade.

Afterwards I sat alone on the edge of the porch and stared into the dawn. The smoke hung dense as fog over the velvet black ruin of the barn. I thought I’d never get the char out of my nostrils. Snow began to fall, and the way the white sat on the cooling wreck felt like an insult. We’d have to clear it, I thought. Beam by beam, and who knew if we could tell what had been wood and what had been metal and what had been bone. I couldn’t cry; I merely felt leaden, soaked with grief like I’d waded into the river fully clothed to lie back and sink.

“Chris,” said his voice.

“Go away,” I said to the ghost.

“Chris.”

I didn’t want to turn, but turn I did. I expected to see some gaunt horror; the wet shine of gore. Instead I saw him standing there, alive and much diminished. He was bedraggled; his clothes were wet and clotted with new snow, stiff and frozen. He led Noah. The pair of them seemed impossible.

I was on him in a second, my nose running against the frigid skin of his neck. I was all tears and blubbering, I’m ashamed to say. But even now I can find something to admire in the purity of the moment, the sharpness of it, like the sting of the cold. We feel things when we’re young in a way we never can again, even if they’re not strictly right. And we’re loyal as dogs, even if it’s wholly undeserved.

He’d gone riding, he said. He’d woken up in a sweat beside me and gone out to get some air.

“Noah was up,” he said, sounding as if he was talking of a mutual friend. “Shoved his nose over the stall door like it was time for his oats, so I took him out with me.”

“You should’ve woken me,” I said, dragging the back of my hand across my dripping nose. “Why didn’t you wake me?” It seemed more seemly that two boys might grow bored of sleeping, steal out of their respective beds to roam in the night.

He gave me a long look. In the moment I took it for regret, but now I’m not so sure. “You were sleeping so peacefully. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

“I thought you were dead,” I said miserably.

He slung his arm around my shoulder and pulled me to him, dragged his lips over my temple. “I’m not,” he said.

It was more complicated that he wasn’t.

***

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” said Zach.

_Say goodbye to the horses, first._

We were leaving them to wait for us at the base of the bridge, the place we’d make the train stop. I fretted a little about Coffee, but Zach had said not to worry, that Noah’d keep her in line. Now, though, he seemed happy to draw the time out, like he didn’t want to leave them either.

“You said they’d be fine, remember? And anyway, we’ll be back soon enough.” I was half-surprised at how breezily I spoke, how businesslike about the whole thing. He’d begun to infect me again.

“Of course they’ll be fine,” he snapped.

Zach went up alongside Noah and whispered in his ear. Noah stood and listened intently as only an animal can, his liquid eyes fathomless, his ears at half-mast. Coffee couldn’t have cared less; she smacked her lips and rubbed her bridled nose on the fencepost and waited for Noah to finish with his master.

“Aren’t you tying him?” I asked, but Zach ignored me.

When we turned to hike down to the tracks he tried to follow us. I could see the tension written all over Zach’s face, lines etched deeper the closer we got. You couldn’t steal up to a train with a horse trailing after you.

“See here,” Zach said at last, whirling to face Noah. “You know you can’t come.”

Noah stood fast, and Zach cursed, kicked at the earth. “Noah,” he said. “Get.” Noah steadfastly refused to get. Instead he ambled closer. Coffee by this point was nowhere to be found; she seemed to have decided she was better off alone. She certainly wasn’t throwing in her lot with a pair of misguided humans.

“Goddammit,” Zach said. He knelt and snatched up a rock, tossing it from hand to hand. “I said get.” Still Noah came forward. If I stared hard enough at his dishy velveteen face I could imagine his expression was one of concern.

“Noah, come on.”

“Zach,” I said, one arm up like he might come at me. “Maybe—“

“No, dammit,” Zach said, voice a little ragged. “He can’t, he knows he can’t. It doesn’t work.”

Noah was a horse and didn’t know a thing, but pointing this out would get me nowhere. Zach gave a roar of frustration and let the rock fly at Noah’s feet. It landed with a noisome clatter and the horse skipped aside, stumbling a little on the uneven ground.

“You’ll spook him,” I said. “And then where will we be?”

But Zach didn’t listen, just threw another rock and still another, and at last Noah balked. Zach turned and marched off at a clip in the direction of the train tracks, and I looked back at Noah, feeling as if I ought to apologize. In the end I just straggled after Zach, and when I caught up with him the look on his face was as stricken as any I’d seen him wear.

“Will he be all right?” I asked.

Zach waved an arm. “Hell if I know,” he said. “Or care. He’s just a horse, dammit.”

“Sure,” I said. “Just a horse.”

Zach didn’t reply.

_Get aboard, second._

When we got close to the train we started skulking good and proper, low to the ground, weaving amongst the rocks, the cutting brush. I snagged my pants on a cactus paddle and very nearly shouted, but I bit my lip against the pain and kept on, feeling warm blood seep into the cotton below my knee. We clambered onto the second to last car, a freight, and huddled up in a corner to get our breath.

_Wait for the train to pull out, third._

We didn’t talk, pressed up together in the boxcar. I could smell soft cedar, the horsey tang of Zach’s leather field coat. I imagined the train lurching forward twice or three times before it actually happened, an easing westward, slow and rheumy like fettered old joints and with a long screech that pained my ears. Zach gripped my bicep, and when I looked at him I saw him pale and sweaty but smiling, fairly vibrating with anticipation.

He leaned close to me and nipped at my earlobe. “We’ll go up to the front,” he said. “You got your piece?”

I wriggled my hand down between us to pull my pistol out of the waistband of my trousers to show him.

“Good,” he said. “It’s a freight, right? So there shouldn’t be more than two, maybe three to worry about.”

That sounded like plenty to worry about if you asked me, and I said as much. He laughed at me. He was past logic now, past planning. He told me the steps of the dance as a foregone thing, like he was telling me a story long since written.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”

We moved through the train like fleas on the back of a dog, the creak and sway sending us this way and that. I’d lose my footing here and again, slide against Zach or away again, grabbing him around the waist. Some of the cars we could cut straight though, some we had to go over or around, and I must have expected to fall a dozen times. It seemed to take us a very long time. I suppose it did; or maybe it all went by in a flash. I’m beginning to think I can’t see it as it happened any more. Only him, in fits and starts, only him as carefree as he’d never been when we were younger. And perhaps I should have wondered why I only saw him happy when things were burning, but then again perhaps I already knew and had no cause to wonder.

We made it to the front and he held a finger to his lips. “You know what to do,” he said to me. His eyes were darting all over the place. “Tell me.”

“I know,” I said. I wanted to touch him, to put my hands on his face. I got as far as his shoulders, but that stilled him enough to think about kissing me, and that was what I wanted. When we parted he handed me a bandanna to put on, and though they only covered us halfway I thought what a pity it was we’d do the whole job without truly looking one another in the face.

When we kicked our way into the control room the engineer was bent at the waist, fiddling with something. A seam or a bootlace, maybe; I found myself wondering what precisely he was doing, who he was. That was like me, though, to get hung up on the little details of a job. It used to drive Zach spare. Pine, he’d say, stop contemplating your damn navel and get going. So that’s what I told myself now, as I stepped across the cramped compartment in half a stride and shoved the muzzle of my gun against the engineer’s temple.

There was a second man in the compartment, and I could see Zach make for him out of the corner of my eye.

“No funny business,” Zach said dangerously. “We’ll kill either or both of you right now.”

“Easy,” said the engineer, and I tightened up my sweaty grip on the gun.

“Easy nothing,” I said. “Turn around. And slowly, mind.”

He turned, straightened up in spite of me and my gun at his back, and in the moment I found that brave. He was a flaccid man, pale, with ginger hair and thick muttonchop sideburns. A prodigious double chin perched grandly atop the collar of his uniform. He was a little sweaty already; he struck me as the sort of man for whom simply moving through life warranted perspiration.

“You’re the engineer,” Zach said to him. “Who’s that?” He jerked his head in the direction of the other man. “And don’t try and obfuscate, either.”

“Express messenger,” the man said. He was as reedy as the engineer was thick. He swallowed over and over as he looked at us; I couldn’t stop watching his adams-apple bob.

“Ah,” Zach said. “You’re the man I want.” The man made a face that said he wasn’t exactly pleased as punch with this information.

“You,” said Zach, waving the muzzle of his gun, “are going to take me back to the express car. Where’s your crew?”

“Few cars back,” the man said.

“Good,” Zach said. “You and I are going to scoop them up on our way back down to the express, and we’ll proceed apace. But in case the two of you hadn’t realized, you’ll be parting with a portion of your train fairly shortly.”

“Now see here,” said the engineer, but I cuffed him across the face with my gun before he could get another word out. It seemed the sort of thing to do. I liked the way his split lip looked against his whey-colored face, and I liked the way Zach looked at me after.

“Easy now,” he said teasingly. “Unless you can drive a train.”

The engineer was bent over again, fat drops of blood staining the floor at his feet. He cast a look up at us, and the expression on his face was one of undisguised and incandescent rage.

Zach went over to him and picked his cap up where I’d knocked it onto the floor. He set it neatly back on the man’s head. “There we are, sir,” he said. “Now. Mister Express Messenger and I will take our little walk, and the two of you will cool your heels up here. How’s that sound?”

“I suppose—I suppose I’m to keep the thing running,” spat the engineer.

“You’ll stop at the first iron bridge outside Dryden,” Zach said, inspecting the underside of his fingernails. “You know the one, don’t you? You’ve run this route before. Yes, that’ll suit us just fine. Then all we have to accomplish is a simple feat of mechanics, and you’ll go your way and we’ll go ours.” He meant to uncouple the freight cars. 

“We’ve got nothing of value here,” the express messenger said, his tone bored. I wondered if he was trying deliberately to sound blasé. It would only incense Zach, but he didn’t know that. I found myself hoping he’d yammer flatly all the way down the train until Zach decided to do something about it.

“We’ll see,” Zach said. He stepped behind the man with a flourish and jabbed the gun between his shoulder blades. “Step lively, friend,” he said. As he trailed the thin man out the door he turned and caught my eye, and my greatest regret is that I all I did there on the edge of things was nod at him once and let him go.

***

It was still winter when we came down off the mountain. I hadn’t been in town in a long time, and the close quarters and crowds tramping through the dirty snow that clogged the Denver streets made me feel hemmed in and claustrophobic even as they excited me. Because here were people, the great loud filthy mess of them, and here was one in particular by my side. 

Zach thrived in the city; I learned that about him right from the beginning. He seemed to draw up its verve like a magnet as we moved through our days, growing more sure-footed and adept even as I struggled in his wake. When I saw him in the city I wondered what could ever have enticed him out of it, and of course my mind turned to the prettiest possibilities, our stars drawing together and yanking us into fate’s blushy orbit.

I missed the farm, try as I might not to, try as I might not to think of it at all.

“Are you certain you’ve got to go?” they’d asked.

_We’ve got to leave here, Zach said._

I swallowed, hard. “Yes,” I said.

_If they haven’t guessed, they will soon enough._

We set ourselves up in a fleabag boarding house next door to a saloon, and no sooner had we alighted in Denver than Zach set about what he called _making connections._

It was early days yet, and I still felt like a fresh horse, like I’d never been tired in my life and never would be. It was morning and I was sitting by the window, tracing the fog on the greasy windowpane with my fingertip. Zach was still in bed. I think we told the landlords we were cousins, but I’m not sure it was the sort of place to care so long as the rent was paid.

“I think I’ll look for a job,” I said.

“Why?” Zach groaned from under the counterpane.

“Um,” I said, feeling suddenly very young and very stupid. “Money?”

“Oh,” Zach said. He waved a lazy hand from beside the pillow. “We don’t need to worry about that.”

“How do you figure?”

“Oh, I figure,” Zach said, which was no explanation at all. “Relax, Pine. I’ll sort us out.”

By the next night he had me perched on a barstool, a reluctant audience. “It’s better if I’m alone,” he’d said to me beforehand. “You understand.” I nodded, unsure precisely what I was agreeing to. It turned out to be a front row seat to the most masterful swindle I’d ever imagined, not that I’d had occasion to imagine many. I wasn’t sure how he did it, whether sleight of hand or a rigged deck or just a marked ability to get his opponents very, very drunk. However he managed it, by the end of the night we had a fortnight’s rent and beer money besides, and the saloon had a tableful of very bemused toughs wondering how they’d just lost so badly at cards.

One of them wondered long and hard enough to steal out after us and jump us in a back alley—or Zach, anyway. He didn’t seem to care much about me. When the two of them were grappling I struck him a broad blow across the kidneys and he barely flinched, just kept on prying at Zach’s throat. By the time the tide turned and Zach had him up against the brick, both of them were bleeding and gasping and I felt distinctly as if I was interrupting something.

“Haven’t seen you around here,” the man said, choking a little on the strength of Zach’s hand. He was dark-haired and slim. Good-looking, I thought grudgingly, and I could see from Zach’s expression he thought so too.

“No,” Zach said. “You wouldn’t have. Mr. Pine and I are new in town.”

The man’s eyes darted to me as if seeing me for the first time. He flashed me a brief and poisonous smile. “He looks like he’s just lost his milk teeth,” he grunted, and I found myself hoping I’d struck a little harder.

Zach dropped him then, and he collapsed in a heap on the trash-strewn paving. “This is getting tiresome,” he said, working his jaw where the other man had cracked him in the mouth. “I’m Quinto,” he said, sticking out a hand. “And that’s Pine, like I said before.”

The man eyed Zach’s outstretched hand a moment, then took it and got to his feet. “John Cho,” he said. He gave Zach a long and measuring look. Whatever he saw there, it must’ve been what he needed to decide to throw in with us, because after that night our twosome had become a trio.

John didn’t bunk with us; no, he had a flop somewhere else, somewhere possibly less reputable than our boardinghouse. He came with a couple of hangers-on, bruisers just as brawny as he was lithe, but I got the idea he kept them around for muscle more than anything. And then there was Eric; who materialized out of the night just like John had, to try his luck with the new horse in town. Zach won him too, and after that we all settled in, ostensibly for a drink. No sooner had they downed the first round and wiped their bloody knuckles than the pair of them shared a look, disappeared, and left John and me at the table for an uncomfortably long time.

“So,” John said presently. “You been together long?”

Boy did that make me snap to, and no mistake. “What do you mean?” I asked, too quickly.

He laughed at me; my jumpiness had given me away surer than anything for anyone who cared to put two and two together. I couldn’t yet tell if he had.

“How long’ve you been running with him? It’s surprising, you know; he strikes me as a bit of a lone wolf. I know the type.”

“What d’you mean by _that?_ ”

“They’ll pack up here and there, when it suits them. They’ve got hangers-on, but they’ll cast ‘em off eventually, and they’ll always end up solo again in the end.” He grinned at me. “Can’t you see that’s what he’s doing, throwing in his lot with us?”

I shook my head. “But Zach and I are…we’re friends,” I said. “It’s different between him and me.”

John just smiled blandly again. “All right,” he said.

I guess he could see I was a lost cause.

Zach had always had plenty of wild ideas —he used to talk about them up in the hayloft, what he’d do if he had all the money in the world. He’d put his mother up in a fine big house, make it so we’d never have to work again. It had all seemed terribly romantic, and yet I’d never paused to consider how precisely he imagined we’d come into such a fortune. Now, down on solid ground, I discovered he’d been giving it quite a bit of thought, and somewhere along the line he’d practiced.

“What did you do after you left Pittsburgh?” I asked him, lying in the dark. And not for the first time—I’d tried over and over to get him to tell me about his past, but as far as I was concerned Zach sprang into being the day he came to live with us at the cabin. He liked it that way.

“Mythos, Christopher,” he said once. I never knew what he was talking about.

Tonight he wasn’t so hung up on mythos as on baser concepts. “Let’s not go on and on,” he said, gnawing on my collarbone. By which he meant I ought to shut up and have my way with him, which I did distractedly enough to earn a biting word or two, a rough hand in my hair as I sucked him.

When we were finished he rolled over me and off the bed, lit a lamp and dressed in the flickering shadows.

“Where’re you going?” I asked.

“Out,” he said.

“Am I invited?” I didn’t bother to hide my pique.

“You don’t want to come,” he said. “Trust me.” When he was ready he came and sat on the edge of the bed and kissed me until I was happy again, or happy enough to let him do what he wanted, which was to leave, to go out into the night and find trouble. When he came back in the morning he brought a fat purse full of bills.

“Where’d you get this?” I asked.

“Cards,” he said, and wouldn’t elaborate.

“Always cards. You’re pretty good at cards,” I said darkly.

“I am,” he said.

I picked at a stain on the hem of my shirt. “Let me come next time, will you?”

“Chris—”

“Please,” I said. “I’m not—if we’re going to live together, then I want to _live._.” 

He gave me a long hard look and ran his hand down his face. I could see he wanted it, and the knowledge thrilled me. I saw a free edge I could pry up and I thought I’d break my fingers doing it. He might make me, just to watch.

“Please,” I said again. I wracked my brain, trying to scrape up a good argument. Finally a shard of memory glinted up at me like glass and I lit on it without hesitation. “Don’t you remember that time in the woods?”

He drew a sharp breath. I knew he did: hot blood running, our bodies clapping together like wooden swords. I wanted to be steel now, I wanted to cut. I wanted him to teach me.

***

The engineer bled sluggishly from the mouth, and soon enough his collar was the color of wine. He cursed me at intervals, and I laughed to hear him. That was what we used to do, me and Zach, the nights we’d exhausted the limits of fucking and were still too keyed up to sleep. For it got better after Denver, for awhile, if by better you mean to say worse and if by worse you mean to say that we used to laugh flecked with other people’s blood, laugh at the faces they’d made while they were bleeding it.

Oh, did you go this whole time thinking I was innocent? I hope you didn’t. No, I’m no better than he is, though I wasn’t born to it like Zach was, you see. Or maybe I was; maybe he bore me anew, maybe I sprang from his forehead ready to kill. 

Maybe the whole time we were talking about money we were talking about something else, and that’s something I honest to God haven’t considered before now. I guess I have done some thinking, sitting here all this time, letting some things percolate. 

“Here,” I said to the engineer. “Here we are.” 

We were at the bridge; there was a siderail there, and lanterns hung to mark it. He hesitated, and i could tell he was thinking of some foolish heroics, but I jabbed him in the occiput with the barrel of my gun before he could think any harder. I thought of the horses, somewhere out there in the dark. The engineer braked; the shriek of the wheels set my teeth on edge. 

I imagined Zach a few cars down the line, and I thought he’d probably be smiling. Slung over his shoulder he carried a small leather musette bag in which he’d bundled three sticks of dynamite, the better to crack a safe with if it came to that. 

“Seems messy,” Zach had said. “Cross your fingers they can be persuaded to be a hair more civilized about things.” 

“What now?” said the engineer to me. The tone of his voice bothered me, and I thought about hitting him again, but I didn’t. I sure wanted to, though, the way his jaw jutted out at me snottily. But he seemed unafraid, and I suppose there was something to say for that. 

“Now we wait,” I said cheerily. “I think now you’ve stopped we can tie you up, huh? Awfully inconvenient, being stuck here with my gun on you when my partner’s where the action is.”

“Shut your mouth,” he said, blood oozing between his teeth. 

“Shut yours if you want to keep those pearly whites,” I said. 

I tied him to a pipe with a length of rope I found coiled in the corner, and then I sat back to wait for Zach. The train uncoupling was my signal; I’d go down to the express and we’d take what we wanted, be gone before the train’s skeleton crew could muster any sort of response. Again I thought of Mexico, Zach and me taking the horses up into verdant hills. I heard there were white beaches there, where you could pick all manner of exotic fruits right off the trees, roast flatfish for dinner on an open flame and sleep out under the stars. I hadn’t seen the ocean since I was a boy. I thought of Zach lithe and tan, his dark eyes darker, his teeth whiter by contrast. I thought of him plunging into the water, the shadows rippling over his body in the deep. He’d swim down and catch me something, drag it up wriggling and screaming. We’d build a fire at night; out away from the trees it could get as big as he liked. But thinking of fire put me in mind of sober topics the likes of which I’d prefer not to recall at present with the engineer huffing down my neck. 

I thought wild things shied away from flame, but he’d proven me wrong ten times over. Sometimes buildings went up in the towns we came through. Sometimes it happened near enough to a bank heist to get the lawmen thinking. In Junction City he got ahead of himself, tried to combine the two in a fireworks display that’d almost gotten all of us roasted alive and had certainly gotten him caught. 

I remember standing in the bank vault sweating, the marble all around me simmering with heat. I had a sack of banknotes slung over my shoulder. It had taken me what seemed like a very long time to realize there was a fire, but now the smoke was thick and black and poisonous. Zach was somewhere I couldn’t see; John was with him, or I thought he was. I remember I’d had a stick up my ass about the two of them, had since Denver if I’m honest but that night I felt it keenly. We’d all hole up after and drink til we passed out and like as not Zach wouldn’t accomplish that next to me. 

_He’s lost it,_ I thought to myself. _He’s finally gone and lost it._ And my next thought was _get out._ As I ran I thought how good it would feel to burst into the cool night air. Like diving into the creek in summer, like Susan’s hands on my face. I’d emerge into the night, I thought, and maybe I’d be back there, and maybe he’d have gone into the woods with Noah and never come to find me. I came out and brushed the debris from my hair and heard shouting, and I ran and didn’t look back. The money on my shoulder--well, I owed a man most of it, and the rest paid my way to Texas and bought me a tumble with Miss Alice as a welcome present. But he’d come along to find me, hadn’t he, and I’d gone right along with only the most cursory of protests.

It occurred to me in the engine compartment that Zach was taking an awfully long time. I stuck my head out the window and peered back along the row of cars, but I couldn’t see a thing. I wanted to call to him but I couldn’t say his name, couldn’t remember the fake one he’d given me. I craned my neck as far as I could, held my fingers to my lips and whistled. Once, twice, three times; clearly a signal, and the night was still enough he wouldn’t have mistaken it for wind. In the lull after my third attempt I heard something, a blurt of noise that died away as suddenly as it came, and fear rang in my heart like an echo. 

“Stay here,” I said imperiously to the engineer, as if he had a choice. Then I went out of the compartment and began to steal back down the train. Perhaps I should have gotten down and run along the track instead; perhaps that would have been the smarter thing. Quicker, more direct. I didn’t. I didn’t know the ground, the furrows and snake holes down there in the dark. Or I liked the romance of running down through the cars, or it just didn’t occur to me not to. The passenger cars came between the engine and the express. They’d pick up the people out west of El Paso and carry them into New Mexico Territory and beyond, maybe out to California by the sea I hadn’t seen forever or maybe they wouldn’t, I didn’t know and I didn’t care and I wasn’t thinking about it. I was thinking of the rich brocade of the passenger cars’ upholstery under my fingers and of the scream of the train’s brakes and if the horses had heard it, out in the desert, and wondered whatever horses could wonder. And the loomingest, the most elephantine thing of all: about that noise, about him. 

When I came to the express car the tension set in thick enough to hear as the eager patron hears the anticipatory hum of the orchestra pit, the violins crouched like sprinters in the starting blocks. When you go outside and the sky is green, when you can taste the thunder and see the sky fit to rend like wet black fabric and feel the almighty crack in your spine before Thor lays his hammer down. 

I came into the car and the curtain drew back. 

A scene for two players; not quite the soliloquy he’d have liked. The express messenger stood stage left, gaunt and lurking like a scarecrow. Stage right was Zach, holding his gun like a torch, as if the shadows held a secret he was he was trying to illuminate. 

The express messenger stood like a spiked iron fence. Zach could skip across from point to point, no trouble. But the man didn’t yet know what Zach could do, and so I watched from the door of the car filled with all the delicious pleasure of dramatic irony. 

The roof of the Greenwoods’ barn was tiled in slate. There was a weathervane perched on the easterly gable--a horse, verdant with patina, in perpetual gallop.

He’s mine, Zach said. I’m going to get him. I don’t think he wanted the horse, not really--the horse belonged to the barn. He needed his bronze nose pointed at the mountains, to call in lightning from the sky sometimes. Zach could understand that better than most. But he wanted to walk out to the horse, trip along the roofline like a tightrope walker because it was high and because it scared me. 

He did it the week we became lovers. We were sitting in the hayloft kissing and he pulled away and wiped my spit off with a long draw of his arm. “I’m going up there,” he said, and pointed, and I told him he was crazy. 

He laughed and didn’t refute me. He rolled up onto the balls of his feet, went on over to the windowsill and clambered out. 

“Zach,” I said, trying to school my voice some kind of authoritative. Needless to say, he didn’t listen, and soon enough I could hear him scrabbling above me. 

“Jesus,” I muttered. I climbed down from the hayloft, slipping on the ladder and winning myself a splinter for my trouble. I made it outside to see him astride the spine of the roof; from there it was a straight shot down to his quarry. 

“You’re going to kill yourself,” I called up to him, and though he didn’t look at me I saw him incline his head in my direction in a way that said just you watch. He made his way deliberately as a dancer, knew every step like he’d taken it twice before, but as I watched him I began to be seized with the horrible desire to see him lose his footing. Not because I wanted him to die-- which he surely would if he fell the right way--but for the drama, as if I thought I could take the moment and spin it out as often as I wanted, sit beside him later and say _Look at the look on your face._

Now everything in the express car moved as balletically as Zach had up on the roof. I can’t recall moving, but I must have; that night I was the only element left unchoreographed. I made some a shift from foot to foot, took an overdeep breath. It doesn’t matter. Zach saw me and the express messenger saw him see me. Zach’s eyes flickered over just the once, but it was enough. I’d find out later he’d taken up a hammer somewhere, pressed it against his pants leg and waited for an opportune moment. 

When the moment came his arm made a wide and flailing arc. At its zenith I saw a blur of pewter; then his hand and its cargo met the horizon again to an ungodly crunch and a red brighter than it had any right to be in the moonscaped cavern of the train. Zach’s skull was in the way, of course, a tragedy of blocking. 

He fell softly to the floor of the compartment. I was vaguely aware of shooting the express messenger and when _he_ hit the floor he seemed to make an awful lot of noise. 

***

I sit here now with my palms pressed against cool stone walls. Soft enough to carve in—some poor soul scored one hundred twenty-one deep lines to tell me so— but plenty hard enough to hold the likes of me. I think Zach could have magicked a way out, slipped between the bars on the windows. I might could do it now, in my current state, but I haven’t got the will to try it. In the future they’ll come and gawk at this place; children will pose for cameras. 

When I first came to sit in this square cell I’m not sure I knew what a camera was yet— I think I must have, but it’s hard to keep straight what’s what these days. Men used to hide up under their cameras, big black drape like the hangman wears, and that I do know. First hand, as a matter of fact.

From the one ear I can hear nothing, from the other hushed voices and the mocking tinkle of keys. They found a witness, someone to place me near enough the crime, as if they needed one after what they found on the train. A singer, says she talked to me in a bar. As fate would have it, that drink I bought her didn’t sit right, and she overslept and missed her train out of town.

I heard what happened, she’d said to the sheriff. And I thought I just had to come.

When she came and fingered me she looked at me dead in the eye. I had to hand it to her for that; she was made of stern enough stuff to send a man to the noose. They wouldn’t let me speak to her but in my head I wished her well, hoped she sang her heart out for the both of us. If they’d asked me for last words I might have given them to her. She’d have hated me to hear it, I’m sure.

I sit here in this place where he’s not and in my weaker moments I get to wondering why. I never held much truck with heaven. Maybe deep down he did, and maybe in the end that got him there, though I confess I doubt it. Perhaps one day he’ll make his way to me and build us a campfire. I’d be grateful for the light, even if there are things that slip past me in the dark I’m not entirely sure I want to see.

On the train I folded myself up in the corner and gathered Zach to me, and so when eternity gets to be especially tiresome I sit and I let myself drift back there. It’s self-indulgent, but these days I take what I can get and try not to feel too soft about it.

I held his head and let him soak my lap. His eyes were open and in the depths of his blown pupils I could see long-ago stars. I saw the two of us supine and drowsy in our hayloft in that appleblossom spring, motes of dust falling through the sunlight like embers. I was talking to him, my fingers running along his clotting hairline as over and over and over I said _You burned me up, damn you. You burned me up after all._

**Author's Note:**

> The train robbery plot is based on the Baxter's Curve Train Robbery, which took place outside Sanderson, TX in 1912 and is frankly so intriguing to me I'm considering revisiting it in o-fic form. I made a few changes to suit my Pintofication needs and set the fic earlier; 1890s or so, if you need a ballpark.


End file.
